Hispanics achieve a Census pinnacle

They're now largest U.S. minority

Demographics experts said it was just a matter of time: The U.S. Census bureau reports Hispanics have surpassed blacks as the nation's largest minority group.

The nation's Hispanic population grew to 37 million by July 2001, edging past the black population of 36.2 million. And demographics experts say the gap will widen because of higher birth and immigration rates among Hispanics.

"We are at the beginning of a century of profound social and cultural change, with obvious policy implications," said Juan Andrade Jr., president of the U.S. Hispanic Leadership Institute in Chicago. "Government needs to begin thinking about it."

The statistics on race and ethnicity released Tuesday are the Census Bureau's first since the numbers released nearly two years ago from the 2000 census. The new numbers reflect estimated population change between April 2000 and July 2001.

The bureau reports that the U.S. population grew to 284.8 million in July 2001, up from 281.4 million in April 2000. Thirteen percent of the population is Hispanic, 12.7 percent is black, and 4 percent is Asian.

Whites remain in the majority at nearly 70 percent, but Andrade noted that demographers say the white and black populations will continue to lose ground against the burgeoning Hispanic population.

That trend already has been seen in Texas, where Hispanics gained on blacks in the 1980s as Texas' largest minority group. Under population patterns observed in the state during the 1990s, Hispanics could be the majority, outpacing whites, by 2030, according to projections calculated by the Texas State Data Center.

Andrade's institute focuses on voter registration and leadership development for Hispanics. While Hispanics remain behind the curve in terms of political power when compared to whites and blacks, he said he expects to catch up.

"It will take awhile before our power reflects our numbers," Andrade said.

Republicans and Democrats have taken note of Hispanics' political potential, with recent campaigns focusing on outreach to the growing community.

Last year, the top two Democratic candidates in the Texas gubernatorial race debated in Spanish. Also last year, the Republican National Committee began sending representatives to citizenship ceremonies to register Hispanic immigrants.

But not all are embracing the growing Hispanic numbers.

Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for Immigration Reform, a group that advocates limits on immigration, said the bounding Latino growth "comes at the expense of other minority groups, especially black people, who have worked for 200 years to get a level playing field, a fair shot.

Hillary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington bureau, disagreed. "There are those who would like to pit the African-American community against the Latino community that share an awful lot more in common than we do in differences."

One of those interests is education, and improving opportunities for Hispanics has to be a priority for the U.S. government, Andrade said.

"We've learned over the decades that the current process does not work well in the Latino community, in as much as our dropout rate has not decreased significantly," Andrade said. After 20 years of work, Andrade said, the gap between the higher graduation rate of white students and Hispanic students has closed by four percent.

"If we don't begin to do something better and more effective, we'll go into the next century having created a permanent underclass," he said.

Demographers long have forecast that the national Hispanic population would surge past blacks. Still, tabulating the population data by race and ethnicity is something of an inexact science because of the way the government categorizes people.

The process became even more confusing in 2000 after the Census Bureau allowed people to identify themselves by more than one race.

Hispanic refers to ethnicity rather than race, according to the government. The census form asks people to identify themselves from among five racial groups (white, black, American Indian or Alaska native, Asian and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander) and to say whether they are Hispanic or non-Hispanic. But many Hispanics didn't follow the government's logic: more than 40 percent counted in the census chose the category "some other race."

About 1.1 million people in July 2001 were identified by the government as black and Hispanic, while 34.5 million said they were white and Hispanic. The figure of 36.1 million blacks refers to those who are not Hispanic, just as the figure of 199.3 million whites does not include those who identified themselves as Hispanic and white.